In One Era, Out The Other

Who Was That Lady? is a passable 1960's farce starring Tony Curtis, Dean Martin and Janet Leigh, script by Norman Krasna, direction by George Sidney. (It also features Barbara Nichols playing the same smart-dumb blonde she played opposite Curtis a few years earlier in Sweet Smell Of Success, as well as a deadpan James Whitmore who steals the film.)

But like any Hollywood product, it can't help but betray the assumptions of its era. The plot has Curtis pretend to work for the FBI to get out of trouble with his wife. What I find interesting is the film's notion that as soon as people find out you work for the FBI, they put you on a pedestal--that being an agent is a high and noble calling, a job only for the best of the best.

Since then the reputation of federal authorities has dropped a bit, and J. Edgar Hoover himself--perhaps the most respected man of his era--has become a punchline. The new cliche is the hero who, even when employed by the state, doesn't go by the book. This attitude is so widespread we hardly notice it any more.

But when it seeps into a period piece, it stands out. This is why I had so much trouble with the animated 1999 feature The Iron Giant. Set in 1958, it has a beatnik who knows about a secret giant robot, and an FBI agent investigating the case. The main character, a boy named Hogarth, likes the beatnik and has an immediate distrust of the agent (who is portrayed as being both paranoid and cowardly). Any film back then would reverse the boy's preferences--and I bet almost any boy back then would be thrilled to meet and cooperate with a G-Man.